Find Inspiration with an Online Design Consultation

Ted Baker Tiles from British Ceramic Tile

With our bathroom renovation now under way (new blog post and pictures coming soon!), I thought I’d just share a bit first about how we decided the design and layout of the new room.

We chose to lose the bath altogether since the room is very compact – and besides, I loathe cleaning the bath! Fortunately the whole family agreed that a nice big shower would work just fine for us.

As our toilet is across the landing in a separate cubicle, the new shower room would literally house the shower and a sink. Sounds easy to plan, doesn’t it? But actually, the smallest rooms can present the biggest challenges and I don’t mind admitting I was finding visualising our new room a bit tricky. If we were sacrificing the bath, we wanted as large a shower as possible, but would a big enclosure be too looming? Where would be the best position for it? Curved tray or straight? We were also losing a sizeable vanity unit, so how would we store our bathroom items? Could we squeeze in a heated towel rail as well as a radiator; did we even need one?

I needed some expert help and turned to interior designer, Karen Knox of Making Spaces. I had got to know Karen through our mutual love of home interiors after we ‘met’ on twitter one evening. As soon as I took a look at her website, I realised how much I loved her sense of style.

Karen offers an online design consult service which I took advantage of. I think people tend to think an interior designer is only for those with a massive build project and a budget to boot, but actually it can be the awkward spaces and ordinary homes that really benefit from an input of creativity and design.

An online design consultation with a professional like Karen can be a really effective way to drill down through all your likes, dislikes, wants and needs. Karen is a natural problem solver who will suggest products, paint colours, furniture, flooring etc over the internet, via email to help you come up with a room design that you love. She is skilled at challenging ideas and offering solutions – in our case, identifying where there would be dead space in our design (unacceptable in a room of such tiny proportions!). Every centimetre counts, so she helped us turn that dead space into a storage opportunity (handy shelves to be built behind the shower tray, cleverly concealed by a slim full length mirrored door).

Karen also suggested that a single wet room style glass screen would help give a minimal appearance in our small room, allaying my fears about having a full shower enclosure, which would have blocked the window more significantly.

I had discovered some tiles I loved by Ted Baker at British Ceramic Tile (top image), but didn’t know whether to go all grey, all white or one wall white and the rest grey. Karen suggested grey all over, using a combination of their smooth Versatile and textured Tactile. All grey would give a more cohesive feel and be offset nicely by the white shower tray, sink and ceiling.

I couldn’t think of a suitable window dressing either – although we have opaque glass, our bathroom faces on to the road, so Karen showed me one that might be perfect and its a design I’d not come across before – a bottom up blind! Which means we could control the amount of privacy perfectly and add a quirky touch to the room.

I personally think there is a real value to having an online design consultation. Even though I knew our old bathroom needed replacing, I was putting it off because it was a big commitment and I was worried about getting it wrong. It helped so much to bounce ideas off someone with experience and vision, which resulted in me feeling excited about the project, rather than filled with trepidation.

Interior design isn’t all about expensive curtains – it’s practical, out of the box advice and ideas. So if you want to improve your home and don’t know where to begin, would like to redecorate but can’t decide how, or you need guidance with furnishings, fixtures and fittings then an online design consultation could work for you.

You can check out Karen’s eye for design on her website Making Spaces and also her blog where she offers lots of practical design ideas.